Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus

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Short Bio

Thomas Kailath received the B.E. (Telecom) degree from the College of Engineering, Pune, in India, and S.M. (1959) and Sc.D. (1961) degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then worked at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, CA, before joining Stanford University as Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1963. He was promoted to Professor in 1968, and was appointed the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in 1988. He assumed emeritus status in 2001, but remains active with his research and writing activities.

Kailath’s research and teaching at Stanford have ranged over several fields of engineering and mathematics, with a different focus roughly every decade: information theory, communications, linear systems, estimation and control, signal processing, semiconductor manufacturing, probability and statistics, and matrix and operator theory. He has mentored an outstanding array of over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral scholars. Their joint efforts have led to over 300 journal papers, several of which have received outstanding paper prizes; they have also led to a dozen patents and to several books and monographs, including the major textbooks Linear Systems(1980) and Linear Estimation(2000).

Kailath is a Fellow of the IEEE and received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2007 for exceptional contributions to the development of powerful algorithms for communications, control, computing and signal processing. Among his other major honors are the Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society; the IEEE Education Medal and the IEEE Signal Processing Medal; Guggenheim, Churchill and Humboldt Fellowships; honorary degrees from universities in Sweden, Scotland, Spain, France, India and Israel; the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian award of the Government of India; the BBVA Foundation Prize
for information and communication technologies; membership of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and foreign membership of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering, and the major science and engineering academies in India.